"Access to education"/everybody gets to go to college...

With a repeal of minimum wage, perhaps we might rekindle the once proud tradition of apprenticeships, a lot of kids could be halfway towards a career before even considering college or a trade school.

...of the ass?

Equal access for everyone as long as they pay their own way. Don't put that shit on the back of the taxpayers. That really pisses me off that these punks think going to college is some sort of right or something.

What happens when the population gets to 99?

That isn't "all."

College IS available to everyone. But not EVERYONE is qualified to attend. And it's NOT the public school system's fault entirely. Some peopl just cannot grasp higher learning and SHOULD be encouraged perhaps find a path to a trade school education. And trade school educations USUALLY means a job after graduation.

Technical training (via military) grad - don't even have an actual civilian Associate Degree. The end result is 45,000 or so annual gross just from the civilian job itself. But wait! I missed out on all the "life experiences" that only college can.......oops, never mind. I think I'm about all filled up with those.
But I missed out on catching that love for learning in general that only college can.....oops again - I have The Science Channel, History Channel, Nat Geo, etc. etc.
So let me recap - Starbucks temp worker paying off his student loans one cup at a time on one hand - tech school fixing the coffee machines
with good pay and benefits on the other hand. Horns of a dilemma for a young person no doubt.
ROLL TIDE!

Like Paladin said, the college bubble will burst...and I'd have to wonder if younger folks will be more motivated then to seek out apprentiships and would employers start to spring for them when there are fewer and fewer college grads to pull from. I mean, even now there are whole industries that are understaffed because there are so few applicants that fit their criteria....offering appretiships and other similar training programs seems like a good way to fill those holes.

All of this will be resolved, when we're able to get a wi-fi modem, and about a petabyte of storage together on a chip the size of today's micro-SD cards, and implant them into the human brain.

"But who will be able to afford the operation?".

Everyone, when the cost of doctors rockets down, when the first batch of implantees automatically know everything, and do the operations themselves.

Sounds far-fetched, and sci-fi, but so did 1000 channel cable, I-phones, and video and bookstores dying out 20 years ago.

Give it....25 years.

Too many people already go to college. I've read that one of the reasons is that employers now use the "Do you have a degree" routinely as the screening tool for potential employees. Used to employers could screen out applicants with an aptitude test relevant to the job that a person would be doing. But fears of being accused of racial discrimination have virtually eliminated testing by employers so instead they use the "degree required" to weed out applicants.

Okay, 35 to cover my ass.

You really think that?

Article in my local paper about a power plant needing long term skilled labor and working with local colleges to fast-track people into well paying careers. It's working out really well. Obviously the more technical careers take longer schooling (maybe a bachelors or whatever) but many skills are two year tech degrees.

That's the way it should be done.

Problem: When the cost of doctors rockets down, everyone will say, "Fuck being a doctor."

"Everyone" being those who are only in it for the money, to which good riddance. Given the increasing role of physicians' assistants and nurse practitioners, a lot of them will become extraneous anyway. Then with a little tuition reform so that med students don't spend the first 10 years of their practice paying off debt, you'll have a New & Improved healthcare system.

I don't think you'd find a doctor today who's only in it for the money. But when you have medical professionals who don't have nearly as much to lose in a malpractice suit as their patient lost in order to bring one, you're going to see a lot of sloppy work. And sloppy work by medical professionals can mean dead patients, so you enjoy your little fantasy and pray you never end up being a guinea pig of it.

There's also the ego-boner.

Is there anything, or anyone, you can't be disdainful toward?

Nope, I'm really fuckin' good at this.

Then you've never met a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. Or one of those prescribing psychiatrists who'll tell you "Once a therapy patient, always a therapy patient."

You still don't understand how insurance works, do you?

By some estimates, there are currently 90,000-100,000 medical mistakes in the U.S. annually.

What were you saying again?

I went in for surgery, my anesthesia is wearing off, and I'm rigged up for my morphine feed. I hit the pickle button, and no morphine bombs are dropping! WTF? Something isn't right. So the nurses have a pow-wow and are struggling with fractions - not a good sign.
They finally figured out all that scientifical math shit, and figure out that they were only giving me a half dose.
So after a few minutes I'm feeling better, but then I started thinking: what if this had went the other direction and they gave me too much, too fast? I had other nurse hilarity too - I was glad to get out of there a few days later!

Happens more often than we'd like to think about. Nurses in particular are overworked and understaffed and not always optimally trained.

Programs like the one you described at your local power plant are what's needed. See one, try one, do one used to be the standard for doctors and nurses; nurse apprenticeship programs would fill the nursing shortage and give students hands-on training, and maybe a little income to offset the costs of nursing school. Guaranteed job placement wouldn't hurt, either.

Well, my good friend was a regular in the hospital will sickle cell anemia. He built up a huge tolerance to Dilaudid over the years, to the point where his starting dose was two or three times the maximum recommended dose. He frequently had the problem of inadequate medication coming from his drip when his regular doctor wasn't immediately available upon his admission to approve the dose, but he also had two incidents where someone misprogrammed the machine, misplacing a decimal point, and set it to give him 10 times his normal dose, a thoroughly ridiculous amount of opiates that somehow managed not to kill him. After the second time that happened the hospital set aside a machine pre-programmed with his proper dosage that would always be available for his exclusive use.

When I had an emergency appendectomy, I was recovering and had a machine hooked up with a Demerol drip. I was self medicating exactly every 15 minutes. My mother noticed and told me to stop unless I was in truly serious pain. In short she told me to man up.

There you go! Dumb it down - use technology that (hopefully) works so no human can be expected to have to crunch any numbers themselves.
They only went to school to learn their job skills. Don't get me started.

Yeah, but part of that comes from the "rich" in "rich doctor."

Psychiatrists aren't real doctors. And cosmetic surgeons who specialize in the elective crap are scum spelled with a capital Cunt.

And you apparently don't understand how medical licenses work.

I was saying yeah, you're onto something, let's pay them less so they have even less to lose and give even less of a fuck. That's a brilliant idea.

It will be a while before surgeons and other specialists will be replaced by robots, but I imagine the day is not far off that your basic medical diagnostic functions will be handled by advanced expert systems. (This expert system is said to have achieved 95% accuracy in real world cases.) Combined with advances in sensors and computerization of medical records, I expect AIs will soon be the norm and will make very, very few mistakes.

Eventually, you may not even have to leave home to be evaluated: scan yourself, send your complaint in, answer questions the system asks, and--bam!--diagnosis.

I prefer to see it as "eliminating human error so fewer patients die." But if you prefer stone knives and bearskins...

The M.D. after their names says otherwise.